I. Field
The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to providing channel dependent credit accumulation for implementing a handover in a mobile communication environment.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as, e.g., voice content, data content, and so on. Typical wireless communication systems can be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing available system resources (e.g., bandwidth, transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems can include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, and the like.
Generally, wireless multiple-access communication systems can simultaneously support communication for multiple mobile devices. Each mobile device can communicate with one or more base stations via transmissions on forward and reverse links. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communication link from base stations to mobile devices, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to die communication link from mobile devices to base stations. Further, communications between mobile devices and base stations can be established via single-input single-output (SISO) systems, multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, and so forth.
MIMO systems commonly employ multiple (NT) transmit antennas and multiple (NR) receive antennas for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the NT transmit and NR receive antennas can be decomposed into NS independent channels, which can be referred to as spatial channels, where NS≦{NT, NR}. Each of the NS independent channels corresponds to a dimension. Moreover, MIMO systems can provide improved performance (e.g., increased spectral efficiency, higher throughput and/or greater reliability) if additional dimensionalities created by the multiple transmit and receive antennas are utilized.
In addition to the foregoing, multi-channel communication capabilities can increase availability of beneficial inter-cell or intra-cell mobile handovers. Typically, as a number of available transmit and/or receive antennas increases, opportunities to obtain a higher quality wireless channel via handover can increase as well. For instance, if a mobile device is in range of several such channels, active content can be transferred from a first channel to a second channel. Transfer of active content, or a handover, can typically occur if one available channel is determined to be superior to a current channel.